True Crime Blueprint

An Unspeakable Orgy Of Violence: Denver's 1984 Hammer MurdersIn January 1984, a stranger walked into four homes in the Denver suburbs over twelve days and used a hammer. Patricia Smith, a 50-year-old interior designer who had just started her own business, was killed in her Lakewood townhome in the middle of the afternoon. Six days later, Bruce, Debra, and Melissa Bennett were murdered in Aurora, and three-year-old Vanessa Bennett was left for dead. More than 500 interviews later, police had nothing. It took 34 years, a change in Nevada state law, and one forensic scientist entering routine inmate samples into a database to finally put a name to it: Alexander Christopher Ewing, a drifter and plumber who had been living two blocks away the whole time. This is the full story of the people at the center of it, the decades of aftermath for the little girl who survived, the paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis that never became a defense, and the Colorado crime lab scandal that has put the DNA evidence back in question in 2026.This is True Crime Blueprint.10minutemurder.com

The Harold Shipman Story: Inside the Mind of Dr. DeathHarold Shipman was a family doctor in Hyde, a mill town outside Manchester, and for more than twenty years he was the most trusted man in it. He did house calls when nobody else did. He knew your family. He'd sit with you as long as you needed. He also murdered at least 215 of his own patients, most of them elderly women, in their own homes, and the paperwork waved him through every single time.This episode goes back to the beginning. His childhood on a Nottingham council estate, his mother's death from lung cancer when he was seventeen, the morphine injections he watched a doctor give her, and the 1976 drug conviction that should have ended his career before it started. Then Hyde, where he built a reputation as the best GP in town and used it to get through people's front doors.We cover the funeral director who noticed the pattern, the neighboring doctor who risked her career to report him, the police investigation that closed in April 1998 and cost three more lives, and Angela Woodruff, the solicitor who read a forged will about her own mother and refused to let it go. Plus the theories about why, all of them clearly labeled as theory, because Shipman never explained himself to anyone.This is True Crime Blueprint.10minutemurder.com

Stinky Piggy: The Robert Pickton StoryHe grew up smelling like the animals he was raised alongside, teased at school for it, attached to a mother who cared more about her pigs than her sons' hygiene. Decades later, Robert Pickton would become the center of the largest serial murder investigation in Canadian history, a case that exposed just how easily police can look away when the victims are poor, addicted, and Indigenous. This episode traces Pickton's life from a childhood on a Port Coquitlam pig farm through the underground nightclub he ran with his brother, the assault he nearly got away with in 1997, the geographic profiler who tried to warn Vancouver police years before anyone listened, and the women whose lives got reduced to a body count instead of the full people they were. True Crime Blueprint breaks down the childhood, the family dynamic, the investigative failures, and the six women whose murders finally put Pickton away, along with the reforms his case forced into existence.This is True Crime Blueprint.10minutemurder.com

Married Into A House Of Predators: The Susan Cox Powell CaseIn December 2009, Susan Cox Powell vanished from her home in West Valley City, Utah, leaving behind her purse, her wallet, and two young sons who would later tell investigators things no child should ever have to say. Her husband, Josh Powell, claimed he took the boys camping in a blizzard at midnight and came home to find her gone. What police uncovered instead was a marriage built on financial control and isolation, a father-in-law with a years-long sexual obsession with his daughter-in-law, and a husband who drove 807 unexplained miles in a rental car before ever joining a search for his missing wife. This episode walks through Susan's life, the abuse she documented in secret before she disappeared, the investigation that almost made it to an arrest, and the horrific 2012 ending that took her two sons with it. Susan Cox Powell has never been found. This is her story, and the story of everyone the system failed trying to protect her family.This is True Crime Blueprint.10minutemurder.com

Eight Bodies in Plain Sight: The Poughkeepsie Serial KillerA quiet street two blocks from Vassar College. A family living inside a house that smelled bad enough to gag people on the sidewalk. And a father who spent two years sitting in rooms just feet away from eight bodies without ever knowing it. This is the story of Kendall Francois, the Poughkeepsie Killer, a 300-pound former Army recruit and middle school hall monitor who murdered eight women between 1996 and 1998 and hid every one of them inside his family's home. We're covering the failed police responses, the woman who survived him and ran, the sister who unknowingly saved a life, and the twisted death penalty timeline that shaped how his case ended. This one has it all: systemic failure, a baffling family dynamic, and one of the strangest capture stories in true crime history. This is True Crime Blueprint.10minutemurder.com